Thank you, Andrew.
So, we're here to discuss the future, the next frontier. You are known for many things. You're a serial CEO, just taken on this role at Verizon. You're also known for your love of martial arts and particularly Krav Maga, which I knew very little about. So, I did my research. I'm told that it emphasizes rapid neutralization of threats through strikes to vulnerable areas. Has that been useful over the years in your dealings with journalists, Dan, when they're within range?
Right. Right. Right. Okay. That's good. Good. Always good to frame a discussion like this. So let's go to your decision to take on this role. You were on the board of Verizon. Last year you came off the board and took the CEO role. Verizon have been losing customers. You're in tough competition in this market. And you've had to take some quite tough decisions early on, but in the first quarter of this year, the first earnings this year, you announced a pickup in subscribers. Now, what was that due to? What have you done in those early months in the role that turned things around?
A lot of prayer mostly. So, you know, I was a reluctant CEO coming in. I was very, very happily retired. Massively in love with my wife. We were spending time at our ranch in Montana and everything seemed actually quite great. And then, to your point, yeah, we have been losing market share. Our market cap had gone from first in the industry to last in the industry. Our future PE ratio was the lowest in the industry, which is kind of a reflection of what the street thought about our future growth potential. And we knew we had to make a change. The board asked me if I would consider it. I said no twice. And then, really out of a sense of loyalty, I decided, you know, Verizon's an iconic American company, had so much potential. I know the industry because I was on the board, I knew the management team pretty well. And so I felt like I might be able to make a difference. So I took the job. I think the first thing was just to be very clear with the company about what reality was because there's a lot of pride inside big companies all the time. And what I basically said is, this is going to be very hard to hear, but we're losing customers. We're losing confidence. We're shrinking and that has to stop. That is not going to be the way going forward. We're going to play to win. And we're going to try to reclaim our market leadership and that's going to involve a lot of very tough decisions. We need to invest back in our customers. We need to take out a lot of costs to make sure we go do that. There are going to be layoffs associated with that. And so I was very blunt, very upfront with what had to happen. And to my delight, you know, employees are adults. They understand what's going on. They want to hear that their leader understands what's happening, that there is a vision for how we win in the future. And then things started ricocheting through the culture. I was very strong on that had to change as well. We couldn't be bureaucratic, hierarchical, process-oriented, risk-averse. We had to really explode that part of our culture, embrace other parts of it, but explode that. And that we were not going to cede market share anymore. And by the way, like first quarter, you know, we put on over a million net adds. I think it really surprised the street, but it also showed everybody in the company that we're capable of doing that. And success tends to lead to more confidence and hopefully more success going forward. So, we're off to a good start, but to your point, you know, it involved a lot of hard decisions and a lot of very honest but somewhat brutal conversations.
People want to be treated like adults. If you level with them, they're going to take them on screen.
You have also defined that part of the company's problem was it identified itself as a network company. It was not thinking about customers. It was thinking about the network more than it was about its customers. How do you make that shift?
It's another part of the cultural evolution, or revolution actually, of the company. We are very engineering focused. Network excellence is at the core of Verizon, but it's not enough. That's not enough. We probably do have, objectively speaking, the best network, but the differential on that is less than it used to be. And we now need to do all of the basic stuff like when somebody calls us, we got to take care of the problem the first time, right away. We have to treat people like humans, not like accounts. We need to, when somebody comes in the store, we need to simplify promotions. We need to simplify our plans and just make it easier for people to do business with us. We have an initiative inside the company. It's called 'Every Customer Has a Name.' And that's been like one of our most powerful initiatives. It's like we should treat everybody like it is a member of our family, a friend, somebody we love because they have a name. They have an issue. They are trying to get something solved. These phones are your most intimate device that you have. You know, unfortunately, when you go out with your wife, they're next to you on the table and they're always like, 'Take your phone off the table.' I'm like, 'Okay.' They're a foot away from you when you go to sleep, you know, like some people take them into the bathroom. It's crazy. It's like you can never be away. And so it's an incredibly important service. And with AI and everything that's happening right now, connectivity, whether you're mobile or at home, through broadband services, through AI infrastructure is more important than ever before.
Driving at those customer needs is essential.
I think of it as the top of the pyramid of Maslow's hierarchy of needs now.
Unfortunately. Yeah. So does that make it totally economically insensitive or do you see, I mean you've got a span of business customers and consumers that you're serving. How much sensitivity is there when the economy is in flux?
Not that much honestly. It is any moment. No, we're not. I mean, it's probably one of the last things you're going to turn off.
So look, our theme is the next frontier. How do you define a company like Verizon's role in the AI revolution? What do you have to do to be at the center of this?
